You may have noticed that a fairly large percentage of the time when I am introducing something especially cool on this blog I preface it by saying the owl guru was responsible for finding it. She’s not called the owl guru for nothing, although the moniker is too restrictive because she’s also a bobcat guru and lots-of-other-species guru. Anyway, in this extremely rare case, I was walking right next to the owl guru when suddenly *I* spotted something really exciting, in the form of a skunk! Of course, it’s just because I happened to be looking in the right direction at the right time; he wasn’t particularly hard to see. There are a couple of reasons I was REALLY happy to see that skunk. Firstly, I’ve only ever seen one other skunk while out walking in a park and in the daytime before. I DID regularly see a few of them in our yard in Virginia, but always at night. Many of my photos of them were taken with the camera traps I had in that yard. The other reason seeing this skunk, and at that time, was meaningful to me was just the day before the resident skunk at Sulphur Creek Nature Center, Shadow, had passed away and as he was one of my favorite animals, I was pretty sad about it. So it was really nice to see a wild skunk the next day.
This is, for obvious reasons, called a striped skunk. We also have in this area the more rare spotted skunk, which I haven’t yet seen.
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